I spent more time than I should putting media into my Plex environment, and have been looking for ways to optimise the experience. This series of articles by Carolyn Van Slyck has inspired me to do some more work on my transcode workflow. I’m also looking at doing something like this or this to automatically ingest the media in the first place.

(Site sponsor) Vembu recently announced Vembu BDR Essentials for Small Businesses. You can read more about that here.

Welcome to the sixth edition of the Random Short Take. Here are a few links to a few things that I think might be useful, to someone.

I’m a big fan of Plex, and recently moved it from my iMac onto a Debian-based NAS. There’s a comprehensive Linux Permissions Guide that you can get here. It came in handy because I have a number of NAS devices serving up media. And you don’t want to see what I did to get multiple volumes mounted via SMB. (It gets ugly when I want the DVR component to be able to record to any share)

So it’s been over six months since I did one of these, and it’s clear that I’m literally rubbish at doing them regularly.

I’ve been testing a number of data protection solutions recently and have needed to generate some data on some Linux VMs to back up. There are all kinds of ways of doing this on Linux, including using dd and /dev/urandom. You can also check out this handy guide on large Linux file creation here. The most useful tool I’ve come across though is from Preston. You can grab a copy of his Perl script here. Thanks also for having short URLs that are easy to remember and pump through wget. And while you’re at it – go buy a copy of Preston’s latest book – it’s great!

One of the reasons I don’t record demos of technical things is that no-one wants to see me bumbling my way around SQL Management Studio. This article won’t help you with SQL, but it does provide a decent starting point when you’re looking at SQL backup and recovery activities.

I’ve probably mentioned it already, but I’ll be at Dell Technologies World and Pure//Accelerate this year. You can find out details on my events page. I’m not sure what other U.S. events I’ll be at this year. If you’re at any of these things and want to say hi or meet up please feel free to get in contact. Or just come up to me and say hi.

Oracle VM came up in a project I was working on recently. This overview page was a reasonable starting point. Finally, check out Stephen Foskett’s article on ZFS. I thought it was well-balanced and a good read, and the article comments reminded me why I’ve stayed the hell away from that particular community. In any case, if you’re going to be at VMworld US this year, come and say hi.

My hosting provider moved me to a new platform in September. By October I’d decided to move somewhere else based on the poor performance of the site and generally shoddy support experience. I’m now with SiteGround. They’re nice, fast and cheap enough for me. I’ve joined their affiliate program, so if you decide to sign up with them I can get some cash.

My blog got “hacked” yesterday. Someone put a redirect in place to a men’s performance pill site. Big thanks to Mike Yurick for pointing it out to me and to my colleague Josh for answering my pleas for help and stepping in and cleaning it up while I was on a plane inter-state. He used Wordfence to scan and clean up the site – check them out and make sure your backups are up to date. If it happens to you, and you don’t have a Josh, check out this guidance from WordPress.

The next Brisbane VMUG will be held on Tuesday February 21st. I’ll be putting up an article on it in the next few weeks. It will be sponsored by Veeam and should be great.

Virtualization Field Day 6 just wrapped up. If you missed any of the sessions, head over to the landing page to get links to the streams and associated blog posts;

Dave Henry did a somewhat entertaining post on EMC’s recent Isilon announcements. It’s now been updated with a few answers to some of his very reasonable questions. I have a few customers who are very interested in CloudPools. And I’m interested in finding out what the reality of the product is as opposed to the slideware;

working for minimum rage

taking the social out of social networking

buy me a pony

photos of food

disclaimer

The opinions expressed here are my personal opinions. Content published here is not read or approved in advance by my employer and does not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of my employers, previous or current. This is my blog.

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